


Mirror, Mirror

by igrockspock



Category: Star Trek: Lower Decks (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, Mirror Universe, Snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28296600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: All hail Emperor Boimler, ruler of the Terran Empire
Comments: 13
Kudos: 38
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Mirror, Mirror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brodeurbunny30](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brodeurbunny30/gifts).



Mariner doesn’t realize they’ve beamed into a mirror universe at first because nobody has goatees. Also missing: skin tight uniforms, bikini tops worn as uniforms, and naked daggers dangling from shiny gold cumberbunds.

There is, however, a holo of a kitten dangling from a rope. The bright, bubbly letters underneath say _Hang in there!_ With extra exclamation points, of course.

She strolls blithely into the lounge and says, “Geez, why is it so dark in here? Computer, turn the lights up to max.”

The entire room groans and grasps their eyes. Mariner says, “ _Fuck._ ”

And then she runs. Straight into Boimler, who’s like, five paces behind her. “It’s the mirror universe, man!” She clutches at his uniform tunic for maximum effect. “Come on, we’ve gotta hide!”

Rutherford says, “It doesn’t look evil to me.”

Tendi shakes her head. “Yeah, the mirror universe is supposed to have way better eye makeup and accessories.”

Boimler points at the holo in the corridor. “This can’t be the mirror universe. Hang in there, such good advice.” He beams at the kitten. “I will, man, I will.”

He sets off down the corridor -- probably to look for even _more_ motivational holos -- so he doesn’t see it when the whole crowd pours out of the lounge and starts pointing at them. No way is _that_ a good sign, so Mariner shoves herself between Boimler and the rest of the crew and points her phaser.

“Bring it, mirror motherfuckers!” she yells, because if she’s making a last stand in an anonymous corridor, it’s sure as hell going to be fantastic.

Or not. Because she’s not holding a phaser. She’s holding a sonic toothbrush.

“Boimler! What the fuck? Why did you replace my phaser with a toothbrush?”

“Aw, come on, we were just beaming down for a survey mission! You should start brushing after lunch, and there was no way we’d need to shoot anything,” he says with a conciliatory shoulder pat.

Okay. So hand-to-hand combat with the mirror universe. Not ideal, but it can’t be much worse than that Klingon prison planet. She grabs Tendi by the sleeve and positions her in front of Boimler and Rutherford. So what if she’s a people pleaser most of the time? When the chips are down, girl can fight.

“Boimler, stay down,” Mariner hisses, but it’s no good. He keeps popping his head over her shoulder, like a ridiculous toddler who wants to see the action. Or worse, like an obsequious ensign who wants to _regulate_ the action.

Whispers ripple through the crowd at the sight of his face. The people at the front fall to their knees, one hand fisted over their chests, the other raised in a salute.

“Terra firma!” they shout.

“Terra firma!” Tendi echoes.

“What? They’re human supremacists!” Mariner hisses.

“Well, I don’t want them to be _mad_ at me,” Tendi says. Which, Mariner has to concede, is kinda fair. Lame, but fair.

Boimler steps around them, and Commander Ransom climbs slowly to his feet. There’s not even a trace of stubble on his jaw. Is he shaving every _hour_?

“The Emperor disguised himself as an ensign!” Ransom exclaims, gesturing reverently toward Boimler.

“A test,” murmurs some asshat Mariner recognizes from the gamma shift. “To identify traitors among us.”

Ransom points at Mariner. “I heard her say cuss words! And her toothbrush is missing the regulation hygiene cover!” 

“Please let me take her to the agony booth, Emperor. The way you reprogrammed them is just so clever.” Gamma shift girl is practically swooning.

Boimler doesn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that, Erin.”

“What the actual f--?” Mariner shouts, but the last word is drowned out by a computerized whistle in Ransom’s hand.

“I’m so sorry for the lapses earlier, Emperor. I am back on my censorship game!” Ransom says. “And I’ve slotted myself for two hours of mandatory reeducation at the end of my shift.”

Mariner’s too dazed to fight back when Gamma Shift Erin drags her away.

***

“So this is the Hall of Reeducation,” Erin says breezily, as if she’s giving Mariner a tour of the ship and not dragging her bound and gagged on an anti-grav sled. She titters. “Of course, you’ve probably been here before.”

She slows down so Mariner can get a really good look at the signs lining the corridor.

_All crew members required to floss before bedtime. Failure to comply will result in mandatory flossing by medical staff._

_Sex pollen incident report forms SX-204A and SX-204B must be filled out in triplicate for archival purposes._

_All crew are expected to participate in trust falls on a bi-weekly basis._

_Gratitude journals are mandatory and must be submitted for inspection at any time._

_Shit._ This is the inside of Boimler’s brain, manifested into the real world. Mariner squeezes her eyes shut, and Erin laughs softly. 

“I’ll let you do that,” she says. “For now.”

A hypo hisses against Mariner’s neck, and the world goes black.

***

Mariner wakes up strapped into a chair. Soft instrumental music is playing, like the background of a dentist’s office. It’s not quite loud enough to drown out the sobs of the guy next door, who apparently turned in his TPS reports forty-six seconds too late.

A screen lights up at the end of the room as the music swells. A deep voice intones, “The only way to guarantee failure is to never try.” Soon puppies are cavorting across the screen, telling her to wag more and bark less. Then comes the armada of protocol refresher videos, governing everything from dress code (“employees are expected to bathe daily!”) and sexual harassment (“when it comes to mind melds, consent is sexy!”). She tries to ignore them, but every one has a quiz at the end, and if she flunks it, the video restarts automatically with an inspirational slogan at the front, like “the distance between dreams and reality is called ACTION!!!!”

Obviously closing her eyes is the only proper response, but they’ve pinned them open somehow and some weird mechanical arm comes down every half hour to administer rewetting drops.

So she does the only other thing she can think to do: she screams.

And screams.

And screams some more.

Then she blacks out.

***

She wakes up to Boimler poking her.

“You’re not dead, right? Cause I would feel really bad.”

Mariner lunges for him, but her arms are still strapped down. “Boimler? What the actual fuck!”

“The manual is really clear.” He holds up a finger, like he always does when he’s quoting regulations. “If accidentally beamed into a mirror universe, pretend to be your evil counterpart until help arrives. So obviously, I had to send you to the agony booth.”

“Are you sure you’re _pretending_?” Mariner shoots back, but her voice is cracked and hoarse from all the screaming.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little over dramatic?” Boimler asks.

“Yeah, it’s not that bad. I’ve learned a lot about puppies and kittens for my next genetic engineering experiment,” Tendi says, stepping out from behind Boimler. “I brought you some throat spray. Open wide!”

Apparently she wanders around the ship in sparkly underwear now, and the light from her bra is almost blinding.

“What did you do to _her_?” Mariner demands.

“Nothing, silly.” Tendi smiles brightly. “My counterpart here is a slavegirl, so I just dueled the girl we found in Boimler’s quarters, and now I’m the emperor’s woman. And I took all her bras and good eyeliner.”

“You took someone’s underwear? Gross.”

“Just the bras,” Tendi says placidly. “I replicated new panties.”

“We practice excellent hygiene here in the Terran Empire,” Boimler says proudly.

Just then, a maintenance hatch swings open and Rutherford pops out. And, okay, that’s not the rescue party that she would’ve chosen, but she’ll take what she can get at this point.

“What happened to your face?” she asks.

“Oh, I had to fight someone for the honor of recalibrating the plasma relays,” he says. “They were off by .08 milliseconds.”

“And you won!” Boimler exclaims, high fiving Rutherford.

“Heck yes I did!” he agrees. He gestures to the cut under his eye. “I consider this a badge of honor.”

Mariner clears her throat to remind them that they’ve forgotten to unstrap her. “So, what’s the escape plan?”

Nobody answers.

The silence stretches out.

“Awkward silence, great answer!” she says, forcing a chuckle. “Fine, okay, whatevs, I’m the one who got tortured all night, but I’m happy to make the escape plan.”

“ _Well_ \--” Tendi starts.

“It’s just that --” Rutherford stutters.

“It’s not really all that bad here, when you think about it,” Boimler finishes. “Look, I know you always thought that if we beamed into a mirror universe, you would be the Emperor, but you gotta share the spotlight sometimes. You don’t have to blow out someone else’s candle to make yours shine brighter, you know?”

“The Terran Empire is a _human supremacist organization,_ ” Mariner says, enunciating slowly and clearly. “That is actually the exact opposite of Starfleet.”

“Thanks to the Georgiou Incident, significant reforms have been made. And we can keep reforming it from the inside,” Tendi says brightly. “Just think, we could change a whole universe! And anyway, their dental plan is so much better than our Starfleet’s.”

“Look, the reeducation program lasts another twelve hours,” Boimler says. He keeps talking over the stream of her profanity. “You don’t mind, right? I mean, honestly, a refresher on the regulations wouldn’t hurt you.” 

Boimler squeezes her shoulder, and Mariner can’t even bite him because the stupid chair won’t let her turn her head.

Rutherford jumps back into the maintenance hatch, and Boimler and Tendi vanish with a cheerful wave, leaving Mariner alone with a bald eagle that says, “Teamwork makes the dreamwork!”

She can practically _see_ the extra exclamation points hovering in the air.

***

Mariner awakens to the sound of a scuffle during her allotted two hours of sleep. Somebody saws away her restraints, and she collapses onto the floor with a thud.

“Mariner!” Boimler shrieks, and then he’s actually _hugging_ her. She collapses into his arms.

“Uh-oh,” Rutherford says. “Is she alright?”

“According to regulation 7429.A.12, your uniform sleeves are cuffed improperly,” she slurs.

Boimler shakes her by the shoulders. “Mariner! Come on! Snap out of it! We have to get out of here!” He shudders. “They eat _tribbles._ ”

“The macronutrient content of tribbles contributes to optimum human health,” she recites. “Their nutritional properties are superior to that of replicated food, and they can be reconstituted into a variety of forms.”

Tendi waves a tricorder around Mariner’s head. “I think you broke her.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?” Boimler asks, waving around two fingers theatrically. “C’mon, I’m sorry! Come back to us!”

He’s going in for another hug, but Mariner dances out of his grasp. “According to paragraph eleventy nine of the handbook…” She takes one look at their horrified faces and dissolves into laughter. “Gotcha! You can’t break me with your stupid workplace training videos!”

Boimler’s looking desperate now, which is frankly a pretty familiar look on him. “That is not funny, Mariner. We need to get out of here. There was an incident.”

“With eating tribbles?” she asks. By mirror universe standards, that’s nowhere close to the worst thing to eat. 

Boimler dabs his eyes with a hanky imprinted with the Terran Empire’s logo. “Ransom asked me to pick the best one. I thought it was for a pet, not my dinner.”

Tendi pats him on the shoulder. “It’s okay, I would’ve cried too.”

“I couldn’t do it, Mariner! First there was the tribble, and then it turns out I’m here to blow up Vulcan. I can’t blow up Vulcan!”

“Well, yeah, obviously not. That’s _genocide_. Which I totally told you would happen, dorkus.” Mariner rubs her eyelids, which are still pretty sore from _being propped open._ “Look, here’s what we’re going to do.”

Tendi and Rutherford draw in close, along with Boimler, who’s pathetically clutching her sleeve.

“You have the Badgey programming stored in your implant, right, Rutherford?” Rutherford nods, and Mariner grins. “These anal retentive assholes going to _love_ a helpful hologram.”

She turns to Tendi. “Remember when you made The Dog do all that scary stuff, like crawl on the ceilings and vomit live bats?”

“I didn’t know it was scary!” Tendi huffs. “I thought it was fun!”

“Okay, great. Whatever _you_ think is fun, appropriate behavior for a pet, I want you to engineer the tribbles to do it.”

“And then what?” Boimler asks. 

He _still_ hasn’t let go of her sleeve, and Mariner can’t shake him off. He’s like a fucking lamprey or something.

“We get Badgey to lead the crew to a cargo bay full of terror tribbles, and then Rutherford figures out how to modify the transporters to beam us back home,” she finishes triumphantly. 

She watches in satisfaction as her crew starts typing away at their padds. If every mission involved defeating a bureaucratic empire with a psychopathic hologram and genetically modified monster tribbles, the captain’s chair would be hers tomorrow.


End file.
